How to remove all line breaks from a string

Question

I have a text in a textarea and I read it out using the .value attribute.

Now I would like to remove all linebreaks (the character that is produced when you press Enter) from my text now using .replace with a regular expression, but how do I indicate a linebreak in a regex?

If that is not possible, is there another way?

Possible duplicate of How do I replace all line breaks in a string with <br /> tags? — Jun
– Jun, Commented Oct 26, 2018 at 0:32

Pikamander2 · Accepted Answer · 2024-11-04 15:42:09Z

824

How you'd find a line break varies between operating system encodings. Windows would be \r\n, but Linux just uses \n and Apple uses \r.

I found this in JavaScript line breaks:

someText = someText.replace(/(\r\n|\n|\r)/gm, "");

That should remove all kinds of line breaks.

If you'd like to also remove tab characters, which are commonly found in between line breaks when working with HTML, you can use this expression:

someText = someText.replace(/[\n\r\t]/gm, "");

edited Nov 4, 2024 at 15:42

Pikamander2

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answered May 29, 2012 at 19:10

Eremite

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4 Comments

iCollect.it Ltd Over a year ago

Why is having the separate \r\n and \n and \r better than just /[\n\r]/g? Surely this is slower than it should be, as it only needs to check each character against the set of two possible options.

Kyle Coots Over a year ago

When parsing returned data from memcached in node.js using /[\n\r]/g did the trick for me. Thanks Gone Coding! The option in the answer butchered it.

cael ras Over a year ago

* Apple stopped using carriage return line endings in MacOS X.

Vahid Over a year ago

And if you want to replace the new line with one single space, you can use: someText.replace(/[\n\r]+/g, " ");. Otherwise, you will end up with 2 spaces.

Robert Harvey · Accepted Answer · 2021-04-15 14:46:46Z

650

Line breaks (better: newlines) can be one of Carriage Return (CR, \r, on older Macs), Line Feed (LF, \n, on Unices incl. Linux) or CR followed by LF (\r\n, on WinDOS). (Contrary to another answer, this has nothing to do with character encoding.)

Therefore, the most efficient RegExp literal to match all variants is

/\r?\n|\r/

If you want to match all newlines in a string, use a global match,

/\r?\n|\r/g

respectively. Then proceed with the replace method as suggested in several other answers. (Probably you do not want to remove the newlines, but replace them with other whitespace, for example the space character, so that words remain intact.)

edited Apr 15, 2021 at 14:46

Robert Harvey

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answered May 29, 2012 at 19:18

PointedEars

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6 Comments

Mathias Bynens Over a year ago

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that there are four different new line characters in Unicode: \u000a or \n, which is a line feed; \u000d or \r, which is a carriage return; \u2028, a line separator; and \u2029, a paragraph separator. In practice though, the regex you posted is sufficient in most cases.

PointedEars Over a year ago

@MathiasBynens Thanks, but U+2028 and U+2029 explicitly do not constitute line breaks in HTML (4.01), which the DOM tree and the textarea's live value are based on: w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#whitespace

Mathias Bynens Over a year ago

@PointedEars Yes, but HTML serialization doesn’t occur when setting the textarea’s .value dynamically, e.g. textarea.value = 'a\u2029b'; textarea.value.charAt(1) == '\u2029'; // true. But this is probably an edge case — as I said, in most cases your regex is sufficient.

PointedEars Over a year ago

@MathiasBynens Because U+2028 and U+2029 do not constitute line breaks in HTML (4.01), that assignment does not display two lines in the textarea with any major DOM implementation and layout engine. So nobody in their right mind would make such an assignment in the first place.

PointedEars Over a year ago

@CrabBucket You’re welcome. But your modification only works if there are literal (already escaped) “\r” and “\n” in the string, or if the code is passed to eval() or something like it (which you should avoid).

|

Suresh Prajapati · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-03 13:22:15Z

var str = " \n this is a string \n \n \n" console.log(str); console.log(str.trim());

String.trim() removes whitespace from the beginning and end of strings... including newlines.

const myString = " \n \n\n Hey! \n I'm a string!!! \n\n"; const trimmedString = myString.trim(); console.log(trimmedString); // outputs: "Hey! \n I'm a string!!!"

Here's an example fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/BLs8u/

NOTE! it only trims the beginning and end of the string, not line breaks or whitespace in the middle of the string.

This only removes line breaks from the beginning and end of the string. OP asked how to remove ALL line breaks.
Worked for what I needed -- beginning and end of string. Thanks!

Kendall Frey · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-29 19:17:28Z

93

You can use \n in a regex for newlines, and \r for carriage returns.

var str2 = str.replace(/\n|\r/g, "");

Different operating systems use different line endings, with varying mixtures of \n and \r. This regex will replace them all.

edited May 29, 2012 at 19:17

answered May 29, 2012 at 19:09

Kendall Frey

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3 Comments

Sebas Over a year ago

I think this will only replace the first occurence

PointedEars Over a year ago

/\n|\r/g is more efficiently written /[\n\r]/g or even /[\n\r]+/g. Avoid alternation unless you absolutely need it.

omni Over a year ago

Not sure if this is ment to be a complaint. It does what I said: remove EVERYTHING not in that HEX range. What chars that are depends on the char set of course, but this post was about ASCII.

RiZKiT · Accepted Answer · 2021-12-02 14:16:53Z

The simplest solution would be:

let str = '\t\n\r this \n \t \r is \r a \n test \t \r \n'; str = str.replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim(); console.log(str); // logs: "this is a test"

.replace() with /\s+/g regexp is changing all groups of white-spaces characters to a single space in the whole string then we .trim() the result to remove all exceeding white-spaces before and after the text.

Are considered as white-spaces characters:
[ \f\n\r\t\v\u00a0\u1680\u2000-\u200a\u2028\u2029\u202f\u205f\u3000\ufeff]

Awesome, but I get it working re-assigning the variable: str = str.replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim();

omni · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-06 21:03:36Z

If you want to remove all control characters, including CR and LF, you can use this:

myString.replace(/[^\x20-\x7E]/gmi, "")

It will remove all non-printable characters. This are all characters NOT within the ASCII HEX space 0x20-0x7E. Feel free to modify the HEX range as needed.

That will also remove some national characters from languages other than english....
Thank you! this was perfect for me. I had line breaks that were not \n and it was driving me nuts

4b0 · Accepted Answer · 2020-09-10 06:06:30Z

20

This will replace the line break by empty space.

someText = someText.replace(/(\r\n|\n|\r)/gm,"");

Comments

Gordon Freeman · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-21 16:24:06Z

18

var str = "bar\r\nbaz\nfoo"; str.replace(/[\r\n]/g, ''); >> "barbazfoo"

answered Jan 21, 2016 at 16:24

Gordon Freeman

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Comments

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-28 22:53:54Z

To remove new line chars use this:

yourString.replace(/\r?\n?/g, '')

Then you can trim your string to remove leading and trailing spaces:

yourString.trim()

aProgger · Accepted Answer · 2021-12-05 11:04:29Z

I often use this regex for (html) strings inside jsons:

replace(/[\n\r\t\s]+/g, ' ')

The strings come from a html editor of a CMS or a i18n php. The common scenarios are:

- lorem(.,)\nipsum - lorem(.,)\n ipsum - lorem(.,)\n ipsum - lorem ipsum - lorem\n\nipsum - ... many others with mixed whitespaces (\t\s) and even \r

The regex avoids this ugly things:

lorem\nipsum => loremipsum lorem,\nipsum => lorem,ipsum lorem,\n\nipsum => lorem, ipsum ...

Surely not for all use cases and not the fastest one, but enough for most textareas and texts for websites or webapps.

This regex works great in VS Code on YouTube transcripts which have plenty of line breaks.

vishu2124 · Accepted Answer · 2019-12-16 16:18:35Z

USE THIS FUNCTION BELOW AND MAKE YOUR LIFE EASY

The easiest approach is using regular expressions to detect and replace newlines in the string. In this case, we use replace function along with string to replace with, which in our case is an empty string.

function remove_linebreaks( var message ) { return message.replace( /[\r\n]+/gm, "" ); }

In the above expression, g and m are for global and multiline flags

Rohit Tagadiya · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-20 06:39:01Z

Simple we can remove new line by using text.replace(/\n/g, " ")

const text = 'Students next year\n GO \n For Trip \n'; console.log("Original : ", text); var removed_new_line = text.replace(/\n/g, " "); console.log("New : ", removed_new_line);

futz.co · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-08 14:24:16Z

The answer provided by PointedEars is everything most of us need. But by following Mathias Bynens's answer, I went on a Wikipedia trip and found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline.

The following is a drop-in function that implements everything the above Wiki page considers "new line" at the time of this answer.

If something doesn't fit your case, just remove it. Also, if you're looking for performance this might not be it, but for a quick tool that does the job in any case, this should be useful.

// replaces all "new line" characters contained in `someString` with the given `replacementString` const replaceNewLineChars = ((someString, replacementString = ``) => { // defaults to just removing const LF = `\u{000a}`; // Line Feed (\n) const VT = `\u{000b}`; // Vertical Tab const FF = `\u{000c}`; // Form Feed const CR = `\u{000d}`; // Carriage Return (\r) const CRLF = `${CR}${LF}`; // (\r\n) const NEL = `\u{0085}`; // Next Line const LS = `\u{2028}`; // Line Separator const PS = `\u{2029}`; // Paragraph Separator const lineTerminators = [LF, VT, FF, CR, CRLF, NEL, LS, PS]; // all Unicode `lineTerminators` let finalString = someString.normalize(`NFD`); // better safe than sorry? Or is it? for (let lineTerminator of lineTerminators) { if (finalString.includes(lineTerminator)) { // check if the string contains the current `lineTerminator` let regex = new RegExp(lineTerminator.normalize(`NFD`), `gu`); // create the `regex` for the current `lineTerminator` finalString = finalString.replace(regex, replacementString); // perform the replacement }; }; return finalString.normalize(`NFC`); // return the `finalString` (without any Unicode `lineTerminators`) });

First - for people finding this not using JS - "most" RE flavors support \R which is "all" linefeeds. Secondly - why not simply someString.replace(new RegExp(lineTerminators.join('|')), '');
@ClasG, you make a good point. I think my line of thought when I wrote this was to only run replace() for the lineTerminators that existed in the string for performance reasons.

h2ooooooo · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-29 19:09:03Z

A linebreak in regex is \n, so your script would be

var test = 'this\nis\na\ntest\nwith\newlines'; console.log(test.replace(/\n/g, ' '));

chaya D · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-07 12:36:02Z

I am adding my answer, it is just an addon to the above, as for me I tried all the /n options and it didn't work, I saw my text is comming from server with double slash so I used this:

var fixedText = yourString.replace(/(\r\n|\n|\r|\\n)/gm, '');

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2018-12-28 22:53:20Z

Try the following code. It works on all platforms.

var break_for_winDOS = 'test\r\nwith\r\nline\r\nbreaks'; var break_for_linux = 'test\nwith\nline\nbreaks'; var break_for_older_mac = 'test\rwith\rline\rbreaks'; break_for_winDOS.replace(/(\r?\n|\r)/gm, ' '); //output 'test with line breaks' break_for_linux.replace(/(\r?\n|\r)/gm, ' '); //output 'test with line breaks' break_for_older_mac.replace(/(\r?\n|\r)/gm, ' '); // Output 'test with line breaks'

Jaman-Dedy · Accepted Answer · 2020-09-10 05:59:52Z

If it happens that you don't need this htm characte &nbsp shile using str.replace(/(\r\n|\n|\r)/gm, "") you can use this str.split('\n').join('');

cheers

Muhammad Rafeh Atique · Accepted Answer · 2022-02-18 17:02:06Z

1st way:

const yourString = 'How are you \n I am fine \n Hah'; // Or textInput, something else const newStringWithoutLineBreaks = yourString.replace(/(\r\n|\n|\r)/gm, "");

2nd way:

const yourString = 'How are you \n I am fine \n Hah'; // Or textInput, something else const newStringWithoutLineBreaks = yourString.split('\n').join('');

yPhil · Accepted Answer · 2023-05-04 10:12:59Z

This will remove all your newlines, spaces, unnecessary characters

str = '\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n \n \n \n Books\n \n \n \n \n\n\n'; console.log(str); var output = str.replace(/\n|\r|\W/g, ""); console.log(output);

'Books'

kobako · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-07 09:31:20Z

On mac, just use \n in regexp to match linebreaks. So the code will be string.replace(/\n/g, ''), ps: the g followed means match all instead of just the first.

On windows, it will be \r\n.

user3777 · Accepted Answer · 2024-11-26 04:05:54Z

0

const result=str.replace(/\\n|\r/g, " ");// the double back slash did the trick.

answered Nov 26, 2024 at 4:05

user3777

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1 Comment

Jeremy Caney Nov 27, 2024 at 9:31

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Stack Overflow community. This question already has quite a few answers—including one that has been extensively validated by the community. Are you certain your approach hasn’t been given previously? If so, it would be useful to explain how your approach is different, under what circumstances your approach might be preferred, and/or why you think the previous answers aren’t sufficient. Can you kindly edit your answer to offer an explanation?

Alan Gómez Pasillas · Accepted Answer · 2025-03-24 06:40:12Z

Hey I want to share with you this! I tried with all the solutions in this discussion and none of them worked for me for any reason, but I found this on Geeks for Geeks and it worked!

let str = "Hello,\nWorld!\r\nThis is a\rtest."; let result = str.split(/[\r\n]+/).filter(Boolean).join(''); console.log(result);

This is the only solution that worked for me after trying everything, hopefully works for you!

Kyryl Vasylenko · Accepted Answer · 2021-07-27 22:33:49Z

-4

const text = 'test\nwith\nline\nbreaks'

const textWithoutBreaks = text.split('\n').join(' ')

answered Jul 27, 2021 at 22:33

Kyryl Vasylenko

1

2 Comments

I_love_vegetables Over a year ago

Pro tip: consider adding more explanation to help everybody understand the answer more, and format your code with code fences

Eric Aya Over a year ago

OP asked how to do it with regex. Also, \n is not the only linebreak that exists.

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